If your child is anything like my two then they LOVE looking at videos of themselves.

I’m not quite sure why? They’re surely too young for it to be vanity. I just put it down to their inquisitive minds working out who they are, and how they fit in with the world around them.

In any case, we worked out quite early on that showing videos of himself to Master F would quickly transform him from a state of complete inconsolability to calmness in a matter of seconds. This effect was quite remarkable and, in times of despair, we would often resort to ‘The F Show’ to calm our little boy down.

Our second child, Lady G, is of a similar disposition and loves to see herself crawling and toddling about the place. This gave rise to a new SleepHero feature: the video loop. Put simply, it loops your child’s favourite video continuously for a pre-defined length of time. Coupled with a smartphone projector this feature has (in times of need) been unbelievably effective to calm Lady G down at bedtime and get her off to sleep.

Setup is easy: start looping a video through the SleepHero app, place your phone in a smartphone projector and put the projector (pointing up) on the floor of your child’s darkened room. The video then plays on your child’s ceiling. Rather than stimulating your child, the lo-fi video effect distracts them and they will be off to the land of nod in no time. Here’s a video I created to help explain and demonstrate:

If you’re of a certain age you will remember those crackly family cine films that used to be projected onto the wall at Christmas time. This feature was inspired by those days #RIPgranny

SleepHero is available for iPhone, iPod and iPad and can be downloaded here.

Does this trick work for your kids? Which videos do they prefer? Please leave your comments below!